March 10, 2017
The Netherlands is quite flat, but people still ski here albeit indoors. The indoor ski hall SnowPlanet in Velsen-Zuid near Amsterdam had a special day out for dogs, specifically huskies.
Some 68 huskies were allowed to run around in the snow for the whole day, an event organised by a local group of dog enthusiasts for the very first time.
You’ll have to click on the link below for the short video.
(Link and screenshot: nhnieuws.nl)
March 8, 2017
The end of junk food novelties is nowhere in sight: this time it’s a ‘Vitesse frikandel’, a frikandel that echoes the yellow and black colours of Arnhem’s local football club to celebrate the club’s placement in the Eredivisie cup final against Sparta from Rotterdam.
The frikandel has a slice of Dutch cheese melted over it with stripes of BBQ sauce and costs 1,75 euro at snackbar ‘t Beumertje, fans of their local football club.
(Link and a pic of the Vitesse frikandel: gelderlander.nl)
March 6, 2017
The website of popular Dutch reality television show Expeditie Robinson recently fell victim to a hacker with a sense of humour.
The hacker placed a picture of Adolf Hitler on the site as a potential candidate for a new season in which ordinary citizens can participate alongside celebrities. Television chain RTL was slow in noticing the ‘intruder’, not having noticed anyone hacking into their site or disgruntled employees.
When people clicked on Hitler, they could read the words ‘Sieg Heil’, which was in the process of collecting likes as a potential participant. Once social media starting talking about the incident, the media got wind of it. I’m not even going to check if the situation has been rectified, I had a good laugh and I’m thinking, it could happen again.
(Link: tubantia.nl, Photo of Paris Louvre facepalm by Phelan Riessen, some rights reserved)
Tags: Adolf Hitler, hacking, television
March 3, 2017
The Netherlands has traded in the three ‘drumming dolls’ of Treble (2006) for a trio of women who don’t drum, but sing in close harmony called O’G3NE as contestants for this year’s entry into the Eurovision Song Contest 2017.
The close harmony is too much for me, it almost sounds like someone is using Auto-Tune instead of actually singing, making it all sound overproduced. The lyrics aren’t appealing to me as a native English speaker, especially fudging the expression ‘turning the pages’ (‘turning the page’) to make the rhyme work. As well, ‘more’ doesn’t quite rhyme with ‘insecure’, which also grates. I would like this song more if I heard some sincerity in the voices, like they care about what they are singing, but I’m not hearing it even though it’s very clear they have singing talent. Oh, and modulating the chorus twice (!) in the song is not helping, either.
Just like many comments on YouTube, it’s not catchy. I can picture some dancers on stage, maybe that will happen, who knows, but I don’t feel this is going to be a winner. I’ve been wrong before, but have a listen yourselves.
(Photo of Microphone by visual dichotomy, some rights reserved)
Tags: Eurovision Song Contest
March 1, 2017
World-famous Dutch tattoo artist Hanky Panky (Henk Schiffmacher), who by the way is celebrating his 65th birthday and 40 years of tattooing at pop temple Paradiso in Amsterdam later this month, will be drawing the design on the Dutch championship (aka ‘Eredivisie’) football.
The football he will design is for the 2017-2018 Dutch championship season, done specially for the 60th anniversary of the Eredivisie and should represent Dutch culture.
According to Wikipedia, Hanky Panky is an expert in the field of body art, having curated exhibitions, written books, and presented TV shows on the subject. And he’s given tattoos to the likes of Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kurt Cobain (RIP) of Nirvana frontman and Lemmy (RIP) of Motörhead.
(Link: footballstories, Photo of Football by Bramus, some rights reserved)
February 28, 2017
Govert Sweep is an 18-year-old adventurous Dutch guy who enjoys filming and adventure. In the video below, Sweep and his friend Seekrz illegally visit and film a tunnel full of old buses, cars and what not, abandoned under the city of Liège.
The story goes that in the early 1970s Liège was supposed to get a subway system. Huge tunnels worth billions were dug and the subway never happened. Since then the tunnel has been stocked full of old vehicles and you can only imagine what happens down there. Have a video look at what it looked like back in the 1980s on French Belgian telly.
Sweep’s video is in Dutch, but you can always use closed captions. At 2:40 they almost get caught by the police breaking in and at 3:35 they finally get into the tunnel. The images say it all and yes, it’s proper creepy.
(Link: limburger.nl, Screenshot of the YouTube video by Govert Sweep)
February 26, 2017
As of 24 February 2017, 24 Oranges has been around for 10 years. Ten years. We have no idea where the time went.
However, instead of a story today, we’re hanging out at 24 Oranges HQ with food and drinks, and working on a video we hope to be able to present to you soon enough.
If you have any questions you’ve always wanted to ask us, now’s the time! Drop us a note in the comments and we’ll see what we can do with it in our video.
As you know, there’s only two of us trying to keep up with the Dutch world around us, but even if we skip a day or two sometimes to catch up on sleep or travel, we plan on continuing to pressing Dutch things for your pleasure.
Thanks for all of your tips, help, advertising and comments so far. Cheers!
Tags: 24 Oranges, anniversary
February 25, 2017
Dutch company MetaSensing has developed a way of taking images using two satellites in tandem to view the Earth’s surface from slightly different angles. Rather than using radar satellites with single instruments, their novel way apparently offers a unique 3D view of the landscape. This airborne experiment using radar satellites orbiting in tandem was carried out for the first time above the flat landscpe of the Netherlands.
The process involved two aircraft flying in very close proximity to each carrying a radar instrument, something that will be replicated in Belgium next month. “While flying two aircraft sounds relatively straightforward, in practice it is a technical tour-de-force calling for well-trained pilots with strong nerves to fly with very little space between each plane”. Christian Barbier of the Centre Spatial de Liège in Belgium explained that by using this tandem method, they could map the movement of glaciers in 3D, improve crop mapping and even create 3D maps of the world’s forests.
(Link: phys.org, Photo of Radar by Pete Favelle, some rights reserved)
Tags: radar
February 22, 2017
Erik de Kuijper from Breukelen has collected some 600 bibles of all kinds and has decided to start a museum. However, his idea of a starting a museum is just come on over and check them out, although you’ll have to find out where he lives.
De Kuijper apparently has bibles that are very tiny, written in Braille and really old ones. He explained that his wife bought a stack of bibles from the charity shop one day and that’s how he started his collection.
The photo above is my Metal Bible, handed out at the entrance of the Into The Grave metal festival in a few years’ back.
(Link: rtvutrecht)
February 20, 2017
From the old box, as the Dutch say, a photo of the Amsterdam street name that nobody checked, which should have read Groenburgwal.
Then again, the country has that neighbourhood named after Lord of the Rings characters and Fart street, and many more stories and fun facts that author René Dings is compiling for a book about street names in the Netherlands.
The longest street name is Ir. Mr. Dr. van Waterschoot van der Grachtstraat in Heerlen, which deserves an English explanation. The Dutch have a title for engineers, ‘Ir.’, Mr. is for ‘Mister’ and ‘Dr.’ is for Doctor and yes, you can compound them. ‘Ir.’ is fading because having taking over the Bachelor’s-Master’s system from the English-speaking world in recent history means dropping titles that are not used in English.
And then there’s more modern day funny names like Mickey Mousestraat in Almere or Eendekotsweg (‘Duck Vomit Street’), Poepershoek (‘Shitters’ Corner’) and Windgat (‘Wind Hole’) in other places, to name a few.
Dings tells the story of a street in Schiedam named after a mayor who got caught doing something wrong, and then you’re stuck with a controversial street name that you have to wait 10 years to change. He also tells about how older cities like Delft deserve more classic names than a relatively new city like Almere. The book is called ‘Over straatnamen met name’ for the Dutch fans.
(Link: nos.nl, Photo of a misspelled street name in Amsterdam by Herenlunch)
Tags: Almere, street names
